Camela and the museum pieces | Television

Ideology is only one, but there are many ways to divide Spain into two halves. Another is the one that showed the beginning of the About Évole dedicated to Camela. First of all, we see images of what we called amateur video before we all carried a camera. In them, Camela on stage in the mid-nineties and different audiences singing her songs. Secondly, a snobbish public that contemplates these images with the gaze of an entomologist along with other objects (a bumper car, a radio cassette, a display of cassette tapes at a gas station…) in an exhibition called Camela 94, along with testimonies from fans of the group. The pieces of this ephemeral museum are one, but the pieces are the assistants.

When Spain is divided into those two halves I think a lot about that poster so popular in feminist demonstrations that says: “I still can’t believe I’m still protesting about this shit.” I see hypothetical intellectuals despise what is popular and their prejudices seem unthinkable to me in 2024. But we are still there. It happens with Camela, but not only with them. It has happened with rumba, with flamenco, it happens with reggaeton and even with Rosalía. How many despise television, believing that they are doing cinema a favor, how many ignore comedy, believing that the opposite of funny is serious, not boring. People incapable not only of enjoying, but of valuing what the majority likes, precisely because the majority likes it. Camela, of course, doesn’t need them. Her resume is the love of all these people.

Also for some years, postmodernism through, the opposite has happened. People who value what it says about their personality that they like something before deciding if they like it or not. And today in some sectors the approach to the popular grants a certain prestige kistch (Bourdieu would have gone crazy). The reality is that everything that is theorized about Camela is worth nothing compared to her millions of albums sold. In the United States they have the American dream and we, if we wanted, could have the dream camelero That Évole dedicates a program to them or that TVE gives them the Christmas Eve special are only symptoms that in those two halves there is always one that arrives first, the people. The kings of Spain are not Felipe and Letizia, they are Ángeles and Dioni.